Kickstarter.. Retro Styled Modular IPS Display

As posted on Stephen Jones kickstarter page..,,,

Checkmate 19″ IPS Retro Monitor Overview

What we are building is a modular display platform to take us into the future of retro computing and gaming or as we say, “Yesterday’s Technology Tomorrow”. It’s the base on which to build your own future proof display solution based on what you need, and with great build quality and good looks. And it’s flexible and upgradable enough for it to last you a lifetime.

“Checkmate really helps in keeping the Amiga alive and relevant. Professionally made new hardware products like these are so encouraging to see. The monitors give a clear and vivid display, providing an ideal all-in-one retro computer solution.”

Amiga Addict Magazine

CRT displays of the kind we all grew up with are terrific displays, but they come with a price. They are not modern tech and as such they are expensive and difficult to maintain, like classic pinball machines or arcade games. We knew we had to come up with a better, more future proof solution going forwards and what we’ve designed is the Checkmate Retro Styled Modular IPS Display platform. Modular inputs and modular outputs.

Modular outputs – it doesn’t come with a panel as standard, you have to add that afterwards depending on what you need. We had to do it this way, start with a base and add options. It’s the only way to be all things to all people.

More info: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/checkmate1500mini/retro-styled-modular-ips-display-for-old-and-new-systems/description

RNOtunes by JVP is out now! 

RNOTunes is a GUI based audio player application with support for many different audio formats, embedded cover images, and Last.fm scrobbling. A video demonstration of the program is available on YouTube.

The program is available for AROS (i386), AmigaOS 3 (68k and WarpOS), AmigaOS 4, and MorphOS. Please visit its homepage for more information, screenshots, and download links.

More info: https://jpv.amigaaa.com/RNOTunes/

 

Dutch Amiga and Apollo Vampire Meetup 2022

Vampire Meetup 2022

What a great day iit was, the 19th of November at the Amiga Apollo Meetup in Almaar the Nehterlands.  Very well organized by Paul ‘Sananaman” Koster (owner of the dutch amiga website https://www.amigascene.nl) and the Dutch Apollo Vampire representative Willem Drijver. There was a lot to see. All Vampire flavours, but also classic amiga`s, ng amiga X5000`s a MiSTer FPGA in nice Checkmate case and the original arcade PCBs. Besides the good catering complete with sandwiches and snacks, there were many nice people to meet. Looking forward to the next episode!.

Direct link: https://www.amigascene.nl/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6343&forum=31&post_id=83235#forumpost83235

 

Out Now! LiteXL 2.1.0r1 by Walkero 

Hope you are all ready for one more release of LiteXL editor, for both AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS. This release is one of the best I made because there are a lot of new features and fixes.

This release brings the code more up-to-date with the official repository and closer to the v2.1 release, which is still in development. This means that we have the latest code as it is created by the original team, which will make future releases easier to be ported unless a huge change will happen.

Source: LiteXL 2.1.0r1 release – Ko-fi ❤️ Where creators get support from fans through donations, memberships, shop sales and more! The original ‘Buy Me a Coffee’ Page.

Version 1.5 of the Hollywood AVCodec released

Airsoft Softwair is proud to announce that version 1.5 of the AVCodec plugin for Hollywood has just been released. This plugin allows Hollywood scripts to load all kinds of video and audio formats supported by FFmpeg. Version 1.5 is a minor update which introduces support for parametric stereo and contains some fixes.

Version 1.5 of the AVCodec plugin is now available for free download from http://www.hollywood-mal.com Thanks to Hollywood’s cross-platform plugin system versions for AmigaOS3 (m68k, m881), AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, Linux (ppc, arm, x86, x64), macOS (ppc, x86, x64), Windows (x86, x64), Android (arm, arm64), and iOS (arm, arm64) are provided.

https://www.hollywood-mal.com/download.html

Out now!! Hollywood Designer 6.0

To celebrate Hollywood’s 20th anniversary this year, Airsoft Softwair, the hardest working men in code business, are back on your screen with another massive release: This time we are proud to present the brand-new version 6.0 of our famous Hollywood Designer. Hollywood Designer 6.0 is a full-blown multimedia authoring system that runs on top of Hollywood and can be used to create all sorts of multimedia-based applications, for example presentations, slide shows, games, and applications. Thanks to Hollywood, all multimedia applications created using Hollywood Designer can be exported as stand-alone executables for the following systems: AmigaOS3, AmigaOS4, WarpOS, MorphOS, AROS, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. This is a feature that is totally unique in the Amiga world!

Hollywood Designer 6.0 is a massive update and boasts lots of new features and improvements over the previous version. We do not want to bore you, so here are just some of them:

* Ready for Hollywood 9.1!
* Vector animations are now supported
* Bullet lists and enumerations with an unlimited number of levels are now supported
* Support for custom list bullets and enumerations
* Fully asynchronous thumbnail window including live refresh and live regrouping
* New presentation mode specifically designed for USB presenters
* Forward/backward stepping through projects on a per-object basis
* Over 10 new action events
* Many action events can handle variables now
* Global shortcuts for pages can be defined
* Support for high-DPI displays and custom display orientations
* Multiple monitors are now supported
* Custom linespacing support
* Full z-order support for buttons
* Soft-hyphen and zero-width space support for advanced layouts
* UID manager for convenient administration of UIDs
* Plugin loader priorities can be customized
* Several new example projects are included
* Full support for Hollywood 9.1’s plugin interface
* Lots of other new features, optimizations and bug fixes

More info : https://forums.hollywood-mal.com/viewtopic.php?p=18186&sid=76e3ca611543488c6f64fa1c07d39173#p18186

New Amiga Tank Mouse funded  

Tank MouseTank Mouse is a brand new computer mouse, inspired by the famous Commodore Amiga 1352. However under the classic look a modern technology is hidden. Tank mouse blends retro-computing passion with everyday tasks. This modernized version is a wireless optical mouse, which received a touch panel, placed between the two buttons, for scrolling. Tank Mouse operates under Bluetooth or 2.4GHz, which makes it possible to connect to almost any kind of device, but more importantly it can be used with your original Commodore Amiga computer! The mouse connects directly to all computers supporting Bluetooth, for other computers a small USB receiver is included. The iconic bold design makes the mouse not only unforgettable but also suitable for left and right-handed people.

More info here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lukas-remis/tank-mouse-your-new-amiga-mouse/

My X5000 with AMD RX570 and HD5450 graphics

As you could have read in one of my previous posts is my AmigaOne X5000 equipped with an AMD RX570 graphics card. The use of the RX line of cards allows us to use the VA library. The Video Acceleration Library has been created to support hardware video decoding on Radeon Polaris (RX) cards. For us AmigaOS4.x users this is a very welcome addition to the use of our beloved OS and X5000.

The downside to switching to an RX based graphics card is not having support in the Linux kernel for this. This results in losing the ability to use LInux on the X5000. The only option I could think of was adding a second graphics card to bring Linux back to the machine.

As there are some posts on the hyperion forum referring to the setup of two graphics cards in the X5000 I thought it would be nice to write about my own setup.

Choosing what card to use.
Since the PCIe X16 slot is already in use for the RX570 card it leaves us with the PCI and PCIe X1 slots to choose from. The PCIe X4 slot in the X5000 is due to bad design blocked by the PCIe X16 graphics card so cannot be used. As PCI graphic cards are hard to find and very outdated (like Radeon 9250) a PCIeX1 card would be the better choice . Finding a PCIe X1 radeon/amd based graphics card is an option, but I tried using a PCIe X16 to X1 converter as those converters are easy to find and cheap due to the whole crypto mining landscape these days. As having a usable linux system for me is more important than the ability of playing games, the performance is not a big issue and a PCIe X1 slot would be good enough.

By using a converter you have many cards to choose from. I started with a Firepro RV620 based normal size graphics card but eventually got it replaced. I could not find a decent way to fit the card in my X5000 case.

For me the best way was to use a low profile Radeon graphics card (MSI HD5450), as this card leaves us the space we need for use of the converter board.
This card also has DVI and HDMI outputs so any monitor can be used, and the connectors are where I want them to be, on the back of the machine.

The monitor.
I first made the choice of attaching both graphic cards to the same monitor. As this is usable, the downside is having to switch input when starting up Linux. As my Philips monitor does not have great buttons and an OSD menu to do the switching, I am using a second monitor attached to the new graphics card just for Linux use.

The result.
So there we have it. The AmigaOne X5000 with RX card for the best OS4 experience and the option to run Linux by using a second graphics card. All stuffed away in the X5000 case and ready for action.

To do.
At the moment the Linux graphics card (HD5450) is using the FBdev (driver) in the Xorg.conf so hardware acceleration is limited… (i think there is a way to make use of hardware acceleration by using the GPU) The other thing will be making use of just on big Linux drive with several partitions instead of two drives.

Thanks.
Big thanks go to the captain of the Amiga Linux Development community, Christian Zigotzky and of course all forum members who keep the scene going. Thank you!

17/2/2022 UPDATE!

As mentioned before the FBdev issue has now been solved. This means that we now have Hardware 3D support. YEAH!!! It was hard to find the correct xorg.conf values needed to get things going…

 

GLXINFO!
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: AMD CEDAR (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.17.0-rc4_A-EON_X5000, LLVM 12.0.1)
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.2 (Core Profile) Mesa 21.3.3
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 1.50
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile
OpenGL core profile extensions:
OpenGL version string: 3.1 Mesa 21.3.3
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.40
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL extensions:
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 2.0 Mesa 21.3.3
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0.16
OpenGL ES profile extensions:
My Xorg.conf to get it up and running!
Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Monitor0”
EndSection
Section “Device”
Identifier “Device1”
Driver “radeon”
EndSection
Section “ServerFlags”
Option “AIGLX” “on”
EndSectionSection “Module”
Load “dri”
Load “dri2”
Load “dbe”
Load “glx”
Load “type1”
Load “freetype”
Load “record”
EndSection

Section “DRI”
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Enable”
Option “RENDER” “Enable”
Option “RANDR” “Enable”
Option “DAMAGE” “Enable”

Option “GLX” “Enable”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0”
Device “Device0”
Monitor “Monitor0”
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
Viewport 0 0
EndSubSection
EndSection